Some people will say Radiohead started it, and then Trent Reznor followed through. There are way more bands out there offering their stuff for free though - just look at <a href="http://www.spacescold.com/">Spaces</a> or <a href="http://www.inhergentlejaws.com/">The Depreciation Guild</a>.

Girl Talk also comes to mind.

Anyway, I'm sure you guys know about a lot of artist-provided free music. Anybody willing to share? (And if you have something you did you're particularly proud of, feel free to post it in that other thread)

Quote Unquote Records, home of the everfun Bomb the Music Industry!, offers all of their releases up on a pay-what-you-want model.

Harvey Danger also released their last album under the same model and later got a record deal out of it. I downloaded the album and proceeded to not only make a donation, but went and bought a bunch of their older stuff.

the Hype Machine is a music blog aggregator site. Put simply, you've got 100's of music blogs who post songs, remixes, live performances and mixtapes legally and allow them to be downloaded for a limited amount of time. This site simply collects all the posts and allows you to go to the site to download them, or to play the songs through the sites music player.

It would only be right of me to mention nerdcore hip-hop. It's a community I've been involved in for a while, basically rap about comics, video games, and computers. It's not all great, but a few notable artist worth checking out are ytcracker, MC Frontalot, and Benjamin Bear. The kinda homepage is rhymetorrents.org, where there are a series of free mixtapes, and links to all sorts of free music. The bulk of nerdcore is free and can be found through there one way or another.

It's a growing genre, so while some of it rules, some of it is pretty terrible. But it's just about all free and worth checking out.

If anyone remembers Course of Empire, the band is offering legal + free mp3s of their albums at their website from here (in zip format).

"Since 1998, Course of Empire's albums have gone out of print and the band members are no longer receiving compensation for these releases. Mike Graff and the webmaster of this site have decided to offer free downloads of all of the band's major releases below. These zip files contain mp3s encoded at 256kbps. "